Aldo Leopold on Environmental Morality

Aldo Leopold (1981) says that morality is 'a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence'. What does he mean by that?

Leopold gives a naturalist account of morality according to which moral behaviour is, ultimately, just another remarkable product of natural selection. Of course, it would probably be impossible to fully explain moral behaviour in terms of biology or ecology; we would need to have recourse to numerous disciplines including sociology, history, psychology, theology and philosophy. Nevertheless, general features of our moral behaviour - for example, reciprocial altruisim, kin preference, visceral reactions to certain acts - may be explained with reference to genetic selection and ancestral environments.

Moral constraints limit our freedom of action in so far as many acts which are physically possible are not performed due to their moral impossibility. As a result, the human being can reap the rewards of sustained co-operation; not least the development of complex social structures. Sometimes the constraint upon physical freedom may not be obvious, e.g. the idea of incest is, for most individuals, not attractive in the first place. In such cases, there is a close alignment between contemporary moral codes and hard-wired psychological traits. In many other cases, the alignment is less clear: we are certainly not hard-wired to always keep promises, but we very frequently do so nonetheless.

The upshot of such a view is that, broadly construed, our moral behaviour is emphatically not as the Christian ideal would have it - that is, fundamentally altruistic and non-instrumental. It is, rather, the opposite: a complex pursuit of self-interest. Furthermore, there is no set of eternal unchanging moral truths; what we consider to be moral behaviour will evolve over time. Leopold identifies two stages in the historical evolution of morality: an initial one in which moral codes dealt uniquely with relationships between individuals, then a subsequent development of moral codes for relating to society as a whole.
He suggests that there is a third stage of moral development which we should now be trying to realise, namely that we must expand our moral sphere once again, to include all aspects of nature, both animate and inanimate. That is to say, we should overcome our current land relation which is 'strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations', in favour of a framework which grants the land (the entire ecosystem) some kind of moral consideration. Interestingly, Leopold's grounds for this initially startling view seem to be anthropocentric - he describes such a move as 'an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity', which implies ominious consequences for our species should we fail to take this step. I'm not sure how else this 'necessity' could be intended.

On a first reading I took this article to be a bit nuts. Re-considering it now I find it a lot more interesting.

References:
Leopold, A. (1981) 'The Land Ethic' in A Sand County Almanac, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp.237-65